Sephora

Key Questions and Issues
Detailed study of the Sephora Black Beauty is Beauty advert should enable students to develop an understanding of how conventions of advertising are socially and culturally relative, dynamic and can be used in a hybrid way.

Analysis of the Sephora advert will enable students to enter discourses on race and gender within a commercial context. The use of progressive messaging around diversity as a form of marketing can be seen as characteristic of how brands are targeting contemporary consumers and some of the contradictions around this approach could be discussed

Media Language

Analysis should include:

• Mise-en-scene analysis
• Semiotics: how images signify cultural meanings
• How advertising conventions are socially and historically relative – the move from television to
  online platforms and how that shapes the form
• The way in which media language incorporates viewpoints and ideologies

Narrative

• How do adverts construct a narrative – or story – around their product and/or brand?
• The ways in which the advert can attract a range of responses and interpretations
• How does this advert create desire for the product?
  Techniques of Persuasion
• Students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the persuasive techniques used in the advert, and issues surrounding brand values, brand message, brand
  personality and brand positioning should inform the analysis

Media Representations

• The way in which the media – through representation – constructs versions of reality
• How and why stereotypes can be used positively and negatively – particularly in the context of
  cosmetics advertising
• The processes which lead media producers to make choices about how to represent social
  groups
• The effect of social and cultural contexts on representations
• Theories of representation, including Hall
• Theories of identity, including Gauntlett
• Theories of gender, including Butler
• Theories of race and ethnicity (Gilroy)